The utility of phonetic versus orthographic transcription methods

Abstract

This study compared composite orthographic and phonetic transcripts derived from the same language sample collected from a three-year-old hearing child of deaf parents. Specifically, discrepancies between the transcripts which involved the use of grammatical morphemes were selected for analysis. The largest group of these discrepancies was subjected to spectrographic analysis from which both spectral and temporal measurements were made. From these measures, an attempt was then made to determine the extent to which the phonetic transcrip tion lent additional information to the orthographic transcription. The results indicated that the information derived from the orthographic transcript for this subject was sufficient for most clinical purposes without additional phonetic documentation.